st time on the 1st of November, 1874, and formed
his first sentence, _hia muta ji_ ("Marie! die Mutter ist ausgegangen,"
_ji_ = adieu) (Mary, mother has gone out), on the 21st of November,
1875, thus a full year later (Schulte).

More important, psychogenetically, are observations concerning the
forming of new words with a definite meaning before learning to
speak--words not to be considered as mutilations, imperfectly imitated
or onomatopoetic forms (these, too, would be imitations), or as original
primitive interjections. In spite of observations and inquiries directed
especially to this point, I have not been able to make sure that any
inventions of that sort are made before there has taken place, through
the medium of the child's relatives, the first association of ideas
with articulate sounds and syllables. There is no reason for supposing
them to be made by children. According to the foregoing data, they are
not thus made. All the instances of word-inventions of a little boy,
communicated by Prof. S. S. Haldemann, of the University at
Philadelphia, in his "Note on the Invention of Words" ("Proceedings of
the American Philological Association," July 14, 1880) are, like those
noted by Taine, by Holden (see below), by myself, and others,
onomatopoetic (imitative, pp. 160, 91). He called a cow _m_, a bell
_tin-tin_ (Holden's boy called a church-bell _ling-dong-mang_
[communicated in correspondence]), a locomotive _tshu, tshu,_ the noise
made by throwing objects into the water _boom_, and he extended this
word to mean throw, strike, fall, spill, without reference to the sound.
But the point of departure here, also, was the sound. In consideration
of the fact that a sound formed in imitation of it, that is, a
repetition of the tympanic vibrations by means of the vibrations of the
vocal cords, is employed as a _word_ for a phenomenon associated with
the sound--that this is done by means of the faculty of generalization
belonging to children that are intelligent but as yet without speech--it
is perfectly allowable, notwithstanding the scruples and objections of
even a Max Mueller, to look for the origin of language in the imitation
of sounds and the repetition of our own inborn vocal sounds, and so in
an imitation. For the power of forming concepts must have manifested
itself in the primitive man, as is actually the case in the infant, by
movements of many sorts before articulate language existed. The question
is, not whe